Rational Christianity
I’ve not been posting much in the past few days for a reason. I’m at it again. 
I’ve started another website, and I’m more excited about this one than the others that I’ve put together. It’s an apologetics website.
To put it simply, I can’t find a single website that explains Christianity in a comprehensive and rational manner. Most of the Christian explanations of the faith are absolutely foolish, and poorly argued. To fill that void, I’ve founded The Institute for Rational Christianity.
Rational Christianity will be focusing on the more abstract side of the apologetics discussion, providing arguments on metaphysics, philosophical arguments for God, ethics, and the logical implications of atheism. The website will not be discussing evolution to any significant extent — that’s a dead horse.
The site is designed both for Christians and non-Christians, providing both apologetic evidence and articles on the importance of evangelism and the current failure of Christian apologetics.
The website is still new, but I’m interested on what the perspectives are on it. Especially from my atheist readers.
Empirical Deism
The entire basis of the current God-debate is wrong headed. We seem to be taking the approach that “proving” the existence of God is similar to proving that the minimum wage increases unemployment among minors, or that gun control increases crime.
We seem to be taking the approach that it’s a political or economic debate rather than an analysis of the senses. We seem to view the proof for God must necessarily look like the proof of a principle or law of nature, rather than simply proof for the existence of a person.
You believe in the Wal-Mart greeter because you see and hear them. You believe your neighbor exists because you see and and hear them. You believe your wife exists because you see, feel and hear her. You don’t necessarily need a traditional “proof” — your senses are enough.
This seems to be all the proof that we need to believe in the existence of others. We sense them, and that is all that we need. To believe in a person, all we must know is that our senses give us evidence of the person.
Interestingly enough, this is not, of course, to say that this is the only reason to accept the existence of a being.
Insert the existence of God. Christians and religious people say that He is a person. An omnipresent one at that. Given that Christianity is a purely empirical belief system, one which is based upon relationship along with belief[1], it would certainly follow that one of the biggest factors for personal belief would be to sense his existence.
Richard Dawkings, in his book “The God Delusion”, explains what he believes to be a trump card on the so-called “God delusion”. Dawkings believes that the prevalent belief in God can be attributed to mishap in human DNA. The “God DNA”, as he calls it, is a leftover product of evolution that explains why people seem to feel as though they sense God — hence their belief in Him.
Dawkings gives no reason as to why the sensing of God is a DNA mishap, and is not instead just humans literally sensing the existence of God. After all, if God is a spiritual being and the human has a soul, it would make sense that the soul of man could sense the spiritual existence of God much in the same way that physical humans can “sense” the existence of other humans through their senses.
It’s interesting that Dawkings also explains that there seems to be something engraved in the human existence that tells us of God. He calls this a mishap of evolution. This could just as easily be interpreted as God simply writing his existence in the programming of life. Rather than explaining God away, it explains God in.
This seems to be a fairly common occurrence among everyone, atheists, agnostics, deists and theists alike — the sensing of “something out there”. Something in the human mind screams out the supernatural when looking at the natural. General individual human intuition points to the supernatural.
An agnostic friend of mine says that she often feels what she considers the “romance of the cosmos”. This “romance” is some kind of “feeling” regarding something out there. The human spirit, as some suggest? Or is it actually a spirit in the literal sense of the word?
The Christian movements are often characterized by an appeal to emotion, and unfortunately often will focus on the emotional aspect of religion, while completely ignoring the rational side — the reasoning. I’ve always been turned off by this approach, even as a Christian.
However, from a purely honest approach, one must admit that feeling as a part of reasoning is not to be unexpected or even looked down upon if dealing with the provability of an entity only provable through the senses. Maybe there’s a reason religion often focuses on feeling — the foundation and cause of their faith was found in the experience of sensing the existence of God on a spiritual level.
All things considered, the number one reason I believe in God is the same reason that I accept the existence of anything else. My senses tell me. I sense God. I sense the supernatural. I sense objective morality, just as the atheist does when someone wrongs them.
For the periods of agnosticism in my past, I viewed this “sense” as something irrational — as something contrary to how one should conclude anything. What I was missing was that the belief in God was the same as the belief in the existence of any other being — one based upon basic senses.
No, this is not a case for God. This is a personal explanation. There is no reason you should accept His existence on the basis of what I feel. A question of empirical truth can be answered only through individual experience. This, again, would make sense in the Christian doctrine of grace — we don’t accept until touched — until we sense its truth.
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[1] One must sense God to believe in Him. I concluded this before accepting reformed theology. I accepted reformed theology for rational reasons before accepting it for Biblical reasons.
This is a good example of why I have concluded Christianity to be true. I hypothesized about God, life, happiness, self-interest, etc, for literally months on end (being an easily obsessed person, I’m not stretching it at all to say that I thought of little else for any significant period of time during this rationalization period) before reading through the New Testament one more time. I discovered that everything I had concluded was reinforced.
Fishermen simply wouldn’t have had the insight needed to provide the philosophical framework of Christianity. It’s impossible that they accidentally stumbled across the most coherent and workable philosophies regarding life, ethics and government.